The famous Chinese traveller Yuan Chwang travelled throughout India during the second quarter of the seventh century a.d.: he proceeded eastwards as far as Samataṭa, and when he was turning back he mentioned six countries which he had heard of but could not visit. Their names are given in serial order: “(1) Shihli-Ch'atalo to the north-east (from Samataṭa) among the hills near the sea; (2) south-east from this, on a bay of the sea, Kamolangka; (3) Tolopoti to the east of the preceding; (4) east from Tolopoti was Ishangnapulo; (5) to the east of this was Mohachanp'o; and (6) to the south-east of this was the Yenmonachou country.”

Though of no great importance in itself, one of the tablets of the Harding Smith collection, numbered W.H.S. 122, is nevertheless worthy of notice, owing to the frequent mention made of a personage, to whom gifts were apparently made, named Man-ištisu. As this name only differs from that of the now well-known king of Ki, Man-ištusu, by the substitution of i for u in the third syllable, the identity of the two spellings seems certain, and it is possible that they are forms of the name of one and the same ruler. His capital, Kiš, is now represented by the mounds of Oheimer, about 20 miles east of the ruins of Babylon. Peters describes the site as consisting of a reddish hill, with many elevations to the west and north.

Among the more interesting tablets of the Berens collection of Babylonian tablets is one of more than usual interest, in that it gives directions as to the offerings to be made to the principal deities of the land.

We have seen how the Panjab and the Valley of the Middle Ganges were organized before the sixth century b.c. We have still to answer the question, wherein did this organization consist? It consisted in three things: it established a differentiation in physical type; it created caste; and it brought about a novel intellectual and religious outlook upon life. Of the physical types we need say nothing more; and the intellectual and religious evolution was -in part a concomitant, in part a consequence of the social evolution. Our primary concern, therefore, is to inquire into the origin and development of caste, and as caste was the creation of the Aryo-Dravidians of the middle land, Madhyadēśa, it is among them that we must seek its origin.

After a delay of many years certain of the cuneiform texts discovered by the German excavating expedition to Boghaz Keui in 1907 have been published during the War (30 wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesettschaft: Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi, parts i and ii—the third part has not yet reached foreign scholars; Hinrichs, Leipzig, 1916). It has therefore become possible to attack the problem of decipherment with a fair show of success, and also to estimate the value of such attempts at it as have already been made. Just before the War Professor Delitzsch published a number of lexical fragments, in which the Hittite words are given with their Assyrian and Sumerian equivalents, and it is from these that every scientific attempt at decipherment must start. The cuneiform originals which were transliterated by Professor Delitzsch are to be found in part i of the Keilschrifttexte.

One of the most interesting and valuable of all the objects-which were presented half a century ago by the late Sir Charles Nicholson to the University of Sydney, for the purpose of forming a nucleus of a “Museum of Antiquities”, is a stele inscribed in two kinds of writing, Egyptian and Karian.